Official Homepage of the SLA.

The Edward Sapir Book Prize was established in 2001 and is awarded in alternate years to a book that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes. The SLA invites books with conceptual and theoretical focus, as well as ethnographic and descriptive works. Single-or multi-author books - but not edited collections - are eligible. Books must have been published in 2006, 2007, or 2008 to be eligible.

Three copies of books submitted for consideration should be sent to the address below by June 15th. (It is sometimes possible for authors to request that their publishers send them.) A committee appointed by the president of the SLA will evaluate all submissions. The winner will be announced at the SLA Business Meeting during the AAA Annual Meeting in November.

Three copies of books submitted for consideration should sent to:

By USPS:
Joseph Errington
PO Box 208277
Yale Station
New Haven CT 06520

By private delivery company:
Joseph Errington
10 Sachem St.
New Haven CT 06520

Dear Linguistic Anthropologists,

The Society of Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) has postponed the deadline for invited sessions from Monday, March 3, to Friday, March 7th. We hope that this will enable more of you to get sessions together for submission. The earlier post I sent out regarding the submission process is archived below, in case you missed it.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about either invited or volunteered session submission. The general AAA deadline for volunteered sessions, papers, and posters remains April 1st.

See you in San Francisco,

Kira Hall

University of Colorado

Dear Linguistic Anthropologists,

It’s that time of year again: The Society of Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 107th Annual Meeting, to be held in San Francisco, CA, on November 19-23, 2008. As this year’s SLA Section Program Editor, I am writing to encourage you to submit invited sessions, volunteered sessions, and volunteered papers and posters so that we can have an exciting meeting in San Francisco this November. The theme of the 2008 Meeting is “Inclusion, Collaboration, and Engagement.” I also hope that you will consider orienting your panels to the conference theme, although you do not have to do so.

Deadlines:

There are two deadlines for submission: (1) an internal SLA deadline for invited sessions (Monday, March 3 Friday, March 7), and (2) the AAA deadline for volunteered sessions and volunteered papers/posters (5pm, Eastern Time, April 1, 2008). While you must submit your materials to the AAA website for both of these submission processes before the stated deadlines, invited session submissions must also be sent by the March 3rd deadline directly to the SLA Program Section Editor. Your email to me should include a copy of your session abstract as well as individual paper abstracts from each of your proposed participants. I will then send these out to the 6-member SLA Program Committee for review. (Note: Invited session submissions to the AAA website by March 3 March 7 can still be somewhat preliminary; you can make changes on your submission up until the general deadline on April 1.)

The word limit for a session abstract is 500 words and for a paper abstract 250 words. This information is posted on the AAA meetings website under “Call for Papers and Participation Rules.” Before submitting, we encourage you to read through “Submission Guidelines and Requirements.”

Invited Sessions:

For those of you unfamiliar with the conference structure, invited sessions are, in the words of the AAA, “innovative, synthesizing sessions intended to reflect the state-of-the-art in the major subfields and the thematic concerns of those fields.” The SLA Program Committee is responsible for selecting sessions for invited status; we are especially interested in panels that feature cutting edge research and theory, topics that cross subdisciplines, and/or topics related to this year’s meeting theme. If you are organizing a panel and would like it to be considered for invited status, please notify me of your interest via email as soon as possible, but by March 3rd at the very latest. Again, you must submit your materials both to the AAA website and to me by the March 3rd deadline. (When you submit your panel to the website, you will not yet know whether or not it has been chosen for invited status, so simply submit it as a volunteered session. We can always change the session status later, should your panel be selected as invited.)Important note: The SLA unfortunately has very few allotted spaces for invited sessions: we can choose either 3 single panels, or 1 double panel plus 1 single panel. We therefore encourage you to consider the possibility of having another AAA section co-sponsor your session together with the SLA, so that we can put more invited sessions onto the conference program. If there are other AAA sections that you feel your panel might interest, please specify this on your application to me and I will consult with the Program Section Editor in those sections to see if there is a possibility for collaboration. You can also contact other Section Program Editors directly on your own, to see if co-sponsorship might be a possibility. For a list of other AAA sections, see here.

If your panel is selected for invited status, I will send you an email to this effect before April 1, with a password to use on-line. You will need this password for the proposal form so as to complete your on-line submission by the general deadline.

Conference Theme:

The AAA elaborates on the theme as follows:

This theme provides us the opportunity to critically examine anthropology’s relationships: across subfields, with other disciplines, with our many publics, and with contemporary social problems. The Executive Program Committee envisions healthy debate as we confront methodological, ethical, and epistemological concerns that unite and divide us; as well as discuss the challenges, risks, and opportunities for growth enabled by this dialog.Inclusion, Collaboration, and Engagement are ideas that have been central to anthropology throughout the discipline’s history and they are particularly important today. Anthropologists, scholars in other disciplines, and the general public have begun to recognize that anthropology has a great deal to contribute in this era of globalization. Still, our discipline remains a mystery to many and we are often not approached when social science information is needed. Moreover, anthropologists are conflicted about whether and how to participate in important public debates. Although there are the myriad attempts to develop a public interest anthropology, we are also wary of activism and public engagement, particularly as we recall government influence on anthropology during times of war.This theme deserves our scholarly exploration. Analysis of the processes that promote inclusion, collaboration and engagement for positive human outcomes is a common area of interest for both academic and applied/practicing anthropologists, as is clear communication of anthropological perspectives to the wider public.

Please refer to the AAA website for more details on the theme.

Additional details:

Finally, the AAA has again asked Program Section Editors to encourage their memberships to consider allotting more time for discussion and experimenting with non-traditional formats. You can certainly fall back on the tried-and-true standard sorts of formats if you wish, but the SLA Program Committee is eager to consider variation. Please contact me if you have any questions. I’m looking forward to another exciting AAA Annual Meeting with strong SLA participation!

Kira Hall

University of Colorado

Proposed by CfHR Task Group on Language and Social Justice
Laura R. Graham, Chair, Ana Celia Zentella, Bonnie Uricioli
(With assistance from Terry Turner)

Whereas:

Anthropology as a profession is committed to the promotion and protection of the right of peoples everywhere to the full realization of their humanity, which is to say their capacity for culture,

and whereas

As a professional organization of anthropologists, the AAA has long been, and continues to be, concerned whenever human difference is made the basis for a denial of basic human rights, where “human” is understood in its full range of cultural, social, linguistic, psychological, and biological senses,

and whereas

In 1990 the US Census Bureau began categorizing individuals and families as “linguistically isolated “ if their household “ is one in which no member 14 years old and over (1) speaks only English or (2) speaks a non-English language and speaks English “very well” [Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Summary File 3, Matrices P19, P20, PCT13, and PCT14].

and whereas

there is no threat to the primacy of English, since 82% of the US population speaks only English at home and more than 2/3 of those who do speak a language other than English at home, primarily Spanish speakers, also speak English “well” or “very well” (2000 Census),

and whereas

the Census does not ask about proficiency in any language except English although multilingualism is a valued norm in most communities worldwide, and every national study of education in the US decries the failure of most of the US population to speak a second language, including the failure of the children of immigrants to keep their heritage language,

and whereas

a widespread and growing English- only ideology, fostered by misinformation about the desire and ability of immigrants to speak English, has led numerous states to declare English their official language, thus denying bilingual services, and/or to make it illegal to teach children in their heritage language even when they are also taught in English,

and whereas

increasing evidence of linguistic intolerance and linguistic profiling in housing, employment, education, health, and child custody cases have been documented throughout the USA,

and whereas

the term “linguistically isolated” conveys the false and damaging view that people who do not speak English very well have no contact with English speakers and/or are outside the pale of U.S. society. More generally, it falsely assumes that it is possible to live a life in any language in linguistic isolation, i.e., isolated from face to face contact or print or electronic media.

and whereas

the Census Bureau’s application of the term ‘linguistically isolated” to all members of a family in which no one over the age of 14 speaks English “very well” incorrectly categorizes the children in those families under the age of 14 who speak English “very well,”

and whereas,

the Census Bureau’ categorizes as “isolated” only the small percent of households in the USA where adults have some difficulty with English, not the great majority in which no one speaks anything but English,

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT

The American Anthropology Association urge the Census Bureau to include a question about proficiency in languages other than English, and to stop classifying those who speak English less than “very well”– and all members of their households– as “linguistically isolated” because the term is inaccurate and discriminatory, and the classification promotes an ideology of linguistic superiority that foments linguistic intolerance and conflict.

List of linguistic anthropology sessions at the 2007 AAA.

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